Western Civilization.p

The New Belle Époque: Democracy and Prosperity Since 1975 651

Berlin Wall a generation earlier. Honecker, the son of a
militant coal miner in the Saar, had been a Communist
since the Weimar Republic and had spent ten years in
Nazi prisons. He had been a leading organizer of the
postwar Communist Party, who rose to become the
head of state security in 1958, and had served as party
leader since 1971. Honecker had followed a policy of
severe domestic repression and a strictly controlled
economy. He was personally responsible for an order
that border guards shoot to kill anyone seeking to flee
to the West, and in February 1989 he had confidently
predicted that the Berlin Wall would remain standing
for one hundred years.
Erich Honecker vigorously resisted reform of the
Communist regime and fought against the idea of

perestroika.The tightly bottled-up discontent of East

Germans became clear in the late summer of 1989,

following the Hungarian decision to open their Aus-

trian border. By West German law, all East Germans

who came to the West received automatic citizenship,

but the Iron Curtain had kept that number small. Sud-

denly, thousands of East Germans exploited Hungarian

liberalization to visit there and then cross into the

West; seven thousand people fled on the first night that

the border was open, and sixty thousand went to the

West in the first month. The DDR was soon losing

three hundred citizens—chiefly the young, the skilled,

and the educated—per hour. The Honecker govern-

ment denounced Hungary and called for another War-

saw Pact invasion.

Timisoara

Baleari

cIs

SPAIN l.

PORTUGAL

MOROCCO

WESTERN

SAHARA

ALGERIA

Lisbon

Madrid

Rabat

UNITED

IRELAND KINGDOM

ICELAND

FRANCE SWITZ.

ITALY

TUNISIA

AUSTRIA

SLO.

Corsica

Sardinia

Sicily

Algiers

Tunis

Ljubljana

Rome

London

Dublin

Bern

LIECHT.Vienna

Reykjavík

LUX.

BELG.

NETH.

DENMARK

GERMANY

CZECH REP.

NORWAY

SWEDEN

FINLAND

RUSSIA

EST.

LAT.

KAZAKHSTAN

Prague

Paris

Amsterdam

Brussels

Berlin

Oslo

Stockholm Helsinki

Moscow

Tallinn

Riga

Copenhagen

MOLDOVA

POLAND

SLOVAKIA

HUNGARY

UKRAINE

BELARUS

LITH.

Budapest

Warsaw

Vilnius Minsk

Bratislava

Kiev

Chisinau

LIBYA EGYPT

ROMANIA

BULGARIA

ALB.

GREECE TURKEY

GEORGIA

ARM.AZER.

BOSNIA

CROATIA

F.Y.R.O.M.

YUGOSLAVIA

LEB.SYRIA

JOR.

ISR. IRAQ

SAUDI

ARABIA

IRAN

KUWAIT

QATAR

Crete CYPRUS

Tripoli

Cairo

Jerusalem Amman

Beirut Damascus Baghdad

Teheran

Ankara

Athens

Tirana

Belgrade

Sofia

Bucharest

Tbilisi Baku

Yerevan

Sarajevo

Skopje

Kuwait

Zagreb

Medi

terran

eanSea

Atlantic

Ocean

North

Sea

Balt

icS

ea

Black Sea

Caspian Sea

Arctic Ocean

Norwegian

Sea

Ebro

R.

Dniep

erR

. Volg
aR.

SeineR.

Rhin

e

R.

Nil

e

R.

Tigri

sR.

Euphra

tes

R.

PoR.

Don

R.

Chechnia

0 250 500 Miles

0 250 500 750 Kilometers

Gdansk

Leipzig

MAP 32.2

Europe after the Revolutions of 1989